Best CPA Network

Google announced a new product to select publishers today, indicating a move away from their trouble-laden CPC network, Adsense. The new Google advertising program, called the Content Referral Network, will pay webmasters when a user completes a specific action, such as purchasing a product or completing a lead form. This differs from Adsense where the only thing necessary for a webmaster to earn money was to have someone click on the ad. Despite their best efforts, this fraud opportunity methodology lead to thousands of webmasters trying to game the system.

It is easy to fake a click. It is much more difficult to fake a sale.

What does this mean for web publishers? Will it mean more money or less? Likely more if you know how to take advantage of it. Selling products online as an affiliate marketer takes a different skillset and most importantly a different type of traffic. You can no longer target casual browsers, you need buyers to actually convert sales with the Content Referral Network. It doesn’t matter if your site gets 10,000 or 100,000 uniques per day — if they are only there to look at funny videos or post on a forum, they will not convert in a Pay-Per-Action scenario. Those types of sites that tend to have entertainment browsers will be better off sticking with Adsense or other contextual advertising like Yahoo! Publisher.

Who can profit from this new ad network? Any webmaster with traffic that is already in the mood to purchase. If your visitors are reading and writing reviews on gadgets or other immediately purchasable products, they will be primed for the new Google affiliate network. You as a webmasters will have more control over how you can display these new affiliate ads — you will be able to market the products and choose which ones to display. This is a huge difference from the total lack of control you might have now as an Adsense publisher.

What does this mean for the existing affiliate networks? Watch out below. With Commission Junction ready to switch over to their new link type, threatening to alienate their most vocal affiliates, the industry is primed for a new player. Google has all the power to become the major force and the timing couldn’t be better. One huge advantage Google will likely bring to the table is a lowered cost of entry; signing up as an advertiser with a current industry leader like ValueClick’s Commission Junction costs thousands of dollars. You can bet with Google it will be free.

Affiliate Marketer’s Journal predicted this in January! See below for the recent Google email, via David Jackson:

How do I participate in the CPA test?

Simply reply to the invitation email and express your interest in participating and we will send you some sample CPA ads. You can then choose which ads you’d like to host and we will send you the code to copy and paste on to your site. It’s just that easy!

What can I do to optimize my revenue from the CPA ads?

While we encourage you to experiment as much as possible with these ads on your site, here are some general tips on implementing a CPA ad:
1) Ads that blend in with the site and are placed prominently tend to perform better. Look to integrate the ad within the page.
2) Ads that are relevant to the interest of your site visitor also tend to perform better. For example, if you have a travel site, having ads relevant to airline travel would generate higher interest. For more tips on increasing revenue, please see our optimization tips page at: link
How do I get paid?

You get paid whenever a site visitor clicks on the ad on your site AND performs a specified action, such as generating a lead or purchasing a product.

Do these compete with regular content ads?

These ads will not compete with contextually targeted ads. Instead, they will show across a separate network, the Content Referral network. To place one of these ads on your site, you can set up a new ad unit that supports any of our current ad unit sizes.

How much could publishers expect to earn with this CPA test?

How much a publisher will earn will depend on a number of factors about the publisher and advertiser, including whether the ads match the topic of the site, and level of interest of their site visitors. We have tried to match the appropriate publishers with advertisers for this test.

Will CPA offerings compete with my current AdSense revenue?

We expect that the CPA test will offer ad units that will expand publishers AFC revenue because the ad units are separate and appeal to different types of users. These CPA ads are also additional inventory to your existing AFC ad units.

How can I promote the CPA ad unit?

Since this is a test and these CPA ads are not regular ad units, we are giving you more flexibility in saying things like “I recommend this product” or “Try JetBlue today” next to the CPA ad unit. However, you should still not incite someone to click on the ad, so saying “Click Here” is not ok.

Where do these CPA ads comes from?

The CPA ads come from a limited group of high quality advertisers that are interested in displaying ads on a CPA basis. They pay you whenever a site visitor performs a specified action, such as generating a lead or purchasing a product.

Will I be able to see reports within my account?

When the test begins, you will receive weekly email reports of conversions you have accrued and your total revenue within the CPA test.

Thanks for the heads up - this is the first I’ve hard of the new Google ad type.

Personally I’d kinda prefer the regular adsense ads because a ‘click’ is easier to get than an ‘action’, but I can understand advertisers would love it.

My one concern is that Google is *not* very transparent about how much adsense publishers earn (percentage of advertiser’s cost), and wonder if they will be more transparent with this CPA. Because current mediators like Clickbank and Commission Junction do inform publishers with exact numbers.

i.e. I’d rather advertise an ebook from Clickbank on my site, know I’ll make 50% commission on sales, than run (potentially) the same ebook’s Google CPA ad and have no idea what I’d make on a sale… and I’d be surprised if it’d be 50%.

But, as long as adsense remains as an option, I’m open to new ideas. However I’ll bet advertisers will flock to the CPA ads and leave Adsense as a barren ghost town.

Great post - thanks again for the news!

-Steve

Comment by Steve Gerard 06.22.06 @ 5:27 am

Thanks, Steve.

As an affiliate publisher myself, I agree. There is no way I would offer space on my affiliate sites without knowing the terms and exact commission rates. Without that sort of transparency, Google will fail to attract those who are already entrenched in affiliate marketing.

However, I do not think it will matter much as they have such a huge install base with Adsense. Once this rolls out of beta, they will have no trouble attracting publishers, and with their low (or free) cost of entry, merchants will sign up in droves.

I am also not too keen on javascript delivery of links (as you might guess from all of the CJ posts), so it is not likely I would using much of the Google CRN. I do hope that it spurs CJ into making changes and not becoming complacent with the fact that they have been dominating AM for the past few years.

Comment by Alex 06.22.06 @ 5:32 am

Goolge affiliate network would be really cool, but I don’t entirely agree with you, click fraud is not such a huge problem as you describe, though of course a serious one, and contextual advertising is still working very well for both publishers and adverisers.
Very interesting post anyway, hope it gets dugg

Comment by Mike 06.22.06 @ 7:22 am

Google is getting out of control with their Adsense. I’m thinking about putting a lawsuit against them. I started a project I invested a lot of money in using adsense. They disabled my account and forfitted money I had due to “click fraud”. Somebody went to my site and clicked on all my advertisements (i knew him, he was my friend and thought he was doing me a favor, had he asked me of course I would tell him not to click my ads knowing about the click fraud). Their fraud bot thought it was me and BAM, done.

Stay away from Adsense because they will f*ck you over.

Comment by Jon 06.22.06 @ 9:01 am

Response to Mike’s post: Tell me how many times you click on a google ad?? In my years of web browsing and everyone I know not one person I know clicks on them. I had done some analysis in the past on my revenue thru google ads vs. affiliate style marketing or froogle/shopping.com/shopzilla and the difference is drastic enough that I no longer use google ads.

Comment by Brad 06.22.06 @ 9:39 am

I think this might be a cool method. I’ve tried both in the past and they seem to generate about the same revenue (for an honest, non-mfs site). Granted, the ad relevancy needs to be fairly high. Ads for diapers on a video game site won’t fly.

Comment by garraeth 06.22.06 @ 9:58 am

Lets look deeper here. How many companies will want to give up total control of the sale process and hand it over to Google? Sure clikbank scum… uh excuse me sellers will flock in but will the brick and mortar stores? Not likely since they would have to completely revamp their sales system to accommodate this as the split or commission would have to be calculated at the point of sale.

This will be the real limiting factor here. No longer will you be able to just sign up for an adwords account and start promoting.

I suppose this is one of the things Google will use their new paypal like system for, I think it is called “googlepay” or something similar. As I said it will be a great thing for newer smaller companies but the big guys will stay away in droves.

Comment by mrrbob 06.22.06 @ 10:21 am

So now the advertisers get to do the click fraud, by creating buyers who rarely perform the “action?” For example, as an advertiser I tell Google that reaching a certain page is the payable action, then I set up my site so many buyers never reach that page.

Comment by Annoid 06.22.06 @ 10:25 am

Response to affiliates wary of Google’s lack of transparency/loss of share of revenue: Don’t look at this as taking away from your current revenue sources and lowering your share of the pie on those, look at this as bring additional advertisers to the table and growing the whole pie.

Comment by Anonymous 06.22.06 @ 10:41 am

Hmmm… I don’t think I ever made any money from Adsense, atleast I never seen any checks… Most people that visted my site never clicked on the ads either…

Comment by Keith L. Dick 06.22.06 @ 12:23 pm

One concern I’d have with a Pay-Per-Conversion model is how accurately Google can track these conversions. If I were an advertiser, I’d have incentive to not report all my conversions.

Comment by Julien Couvreur 06.22.06 @ 1:42 pm

What will happen if CPC & context based adsense is completely phased out in favor of CPA ? Do you see that happening ?

Comment by khabri 06.22.06 @ 6:24 pm

Getting rid of Content Network CPC without a proven, viable replacement would never happen to a public company depending on it for half (?) of it’s revenue. Could it happen eventually? Sure; one scenario would be a massive revelation of click-fraud. Merchants might prefer the security of CPA once they get used to it the Google way (whatever that will be).

Comment by Alex 06.22.06 @ 8:01 pm

Could this be the end of the blogging-for-money trend as we know it?

Comment by hacker not cracker 06.22.06 @ 9:24 pm

I see several problems here….

As a publisher,, I am sure that advertisers will agree to a let’s say 20% commission of all sales made through Google. That means, Google understands that the value of a product is a constant. (If that is not the case then they are all ready to go to prison) Hm, interesting….

The question is, why does Google think they can determine the value of my commission? Here is why I am asking that!

My advertising space should be rented out. Not evaluated by Google. The advertiser doesn’t give a flying f(d)uck about where the sale came from. Especially if they are not paying for advertising and they are paying commission for sales.

Now let me elaborate in 2 sentences. SO WHAT if I am selling chicken on the gaming site? Maybe I have a great, mouth watering chicken game and people can’t resist going to buy chicken after a good chicken bashing.

My point is. Yes, SURE, I am all GO for free advertising. That will mean more traffic and more money for EVERYONE, but having Google decide if Mary’s knitting needle sale is worth more for John and less for Steve is disrespectful, at the least. Especially because Mary doesn’t give a duck that I spoke of before. She is happily cunting the new dime she got.

If the model is like this:

Advertiser pays Google a fixed 10% (for using their network) and me a fixed 20% or 30% for bringing a sale or a few (constant) percent per lead, even if it is from a dirty yard, then we are talking about an awesome network, where I will maybe serve the purpose of a traffic director only, but the advertisers won’t throw money away on worthless clicks and I won’t be happy to see 0.23 but rather a 23 in my account today.

Now I am seeing the lead generating problem. People are not leaving real info on forms anyway. How much money do you think you can make by ,, let’s see,, an auto submission software that pretends to come from your site and fills in the form on a landing site.

And then there are more issues here.
HOW will I as the advertiser now, implement Google technology into my site, for Google tracking purposes? What will securely separate my Google traffic from my other traffic?

As the publisher again! If Google is not implementing a payment gateway, what will guarantee that the advertiser is not cheating on me? Or is this “the revenge of angry advertisers” model?

Sorry for the long post. But I get ticked off when I see them burying them selves deeper into disrespectfulness of publishers.

Comment by Kristina 06.22.06 @ 9:32 pm

I hope Google keeps AdSense for a while yet: that’s a *major* revenue earner for my site. I can’t imagine earning what I am now under their new system. All I can see is a disaster.

Comment by Anonymous 06.22.06 @ 11:35 pm

This is the end of Google. The same thing happened in the porn industry where pay for click went to pay for signup and the advertising industry dropped a fe w zeros off the end. Google advertisers will switch over the CPA and decimate Google’s revenue..

Comment by matt 06.23.06 @ 3:59 am

Whether you’re better off with adsense or affiliate programs depends on the type of content and audience your site has. I’ve seen different results for both types of advertising against different types of content.

The thing that’s great about Adsense is that you can use it to promote content and online experiences, not just products. You can’t easily do that with an affiliate programme (unless you’re selling the content).

Adsense also places a value on the site visit, which affiliate programs assume is worthless unless it generates a sale soon. If you refer a visitor to Amazon and they spend half an hour browsing but don’t buy yet, you don’t get anything but Amazon gets a whole load of customer interaction for free. Many affiliate programs offer cookies to give credit beyond the immediate click, but I think there should be some credit just for getting people to visit. While advertising hosts have to take some responsibility for the quality of visitors they refer (their willingness to buy), advertisers must assume responsibility for their ability to close the deal too.

Comment by Sean@Prompt 06.23.06 @ 6:06 am

this would be interesting if Bill Gross from Idea Lab, didn’t do this first. He first created ad bidding with Overture, which he sold to Yahoo! and then began pushing for CPA with SNAP.com. Google isn’t really innovative, they just have the big audience to make it seem like they are innovative when in fact they are just copying someone else.

Comment by adam 06.23.06 @ 8:14 am

Very little of what Google has done lately is innovative. Their search engine was innovative years ago and Google Maps was a great addition to the stable. Other than that, they are re-inventing the wheel, you are correct.

Comment by Alex 06.23.06 @ 3:12 pm

So what next for genuine bloggers and publishers in the post adsense/CPC era ? Shut down and fry burgers at McDonalds ?

Comment by khabri 06.23.06 @ 7:17 pm

Even with google exploring CPA Methods CPC will be around for a long time still… it is to profitable for google to jump straight to CPA model.

Comment by CPA Affiliates 02.11.07 @ 5:00 pm

Not everyone is going to buy something everyday.Say for buying a car they want to have to read reviews,look images,advts and so on.After three months only normally he decide to buy.So still they need car advts running on websites to watch.If Google drops, some company will come with a new Adsense programe,Because website visitors do like this kind of Advts.They are familiar with that.So the publishers will change side.

Comment by Paul 04.05.07 @ 7:54 pm

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 4:49 am and is filed under Affiliate Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.